I should work for Nasa! They found a wheel deployment reading on one of the sensor logs they're going through today. The left main gear did come down. That was the cause of the drag, and that drag was the cause of the untimely destruction of Columbia.
I got to thinking last night : things starting with the letters "columb" don't appear to be working out too well. Columbine high school shooting. Columbia shuttle destroyed. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd think "columb" was something to be afraid of :-)

American "intelligence" seems about as robust as British "intelligence". Seems that the current "Orange Alert" was based upon false info given by prisoner. The FBI didn't bother to check its veracity until after raising the alert. Again.
Ho hum.

And I claim my $5. NASA today said that a punctured wheel well door "almost certainly" led to the tyre in the left main gear exploding and releasing superheated air into the wing area. I stick to my theory that this would have caused the explosive bolts to go off and deploy the wheel into the airflow with the resulting nastiness.

Seems like B.A's staff are all as good as each other. Their amazing acuity and attention to detail at their security checkpoints in Venezuela allows a guy to get on a B.A. flight with a live hand grenade in his luggage. Live. Hand grenade. How the crap did the luggage make it through the CTX scanner and not get caught?

In other news, I think I've cracked the design of the generic model for our new product. The model that is all things to all people whilst not actually solving many problems, will live again! Mwa ha ha ha ha hahahahahaha!

I just found out they've virtually shut down Heathrow with military - they have frickin' tanks on the runways! Seems there's a very specific terror threat against London right now. If that's the case, it seems the perpetrators must have read the old 1977 book by Richard Cox (Sam-7) where a surface-to-air missile brings down a DC-10 over Victoria Station. A little prophetic....

You wouldn't think it was that difficult to change the registrar of a domain that you own. I reckon it's because one of my domains is held at Yahoo!Domains that I've got a problem. The last time I tried to take my property elsewhere from Geocities (as it was - now Yahoo!) it took over 6 months. This time, I'm 2 months in and still not getting anywhere. I've asked my site provider to become the registrar for my domain name too, and they claim it's Yahoo!s problem that I'm not getting the transfer authorisation. Yahoo! (of course) never answer any of their emails, which takes me back to Duploweb. They don't seem to understand that I've paid my fee but haven't had a working email link or authorisation request from anyone yet. It's pissing me off.

Here's an interesting conspiracy theory. With the Shuttle fleet currently grounded, the only way to get the US astronauts back from the space station is to use the Russian vehicles. But Russia doesn't want a war with Iraq. I wonder if Putin would dare use this as a lever to force GWB's hand?

The Pentagon today ordered 77,000 bodybags (as oppose to 16,000 in the first Gulf War). This does rather suggest that Bush is expecting a lot of servicemen to return in pieces. I wonder how long the public will support that stance?
Meanwhile, Russia is supporting France, Germany and Belgium, who are all opposed to the US declaring war on Iraq. Vice President Blair is suffering the worst ratings of any political party in history and the U.N have openly-visible internal divides about the whole Iraq problem. North Korea is upping the nuclear ante and Iran has declared an open policy of pursuing nuclear proliferation. The worrying thing is that all this leads to a pattern that looks more like the precursor to a third world war rather than a second Gulf War. The old divides are opening up again and new allies are falling to pieces. Blair needs to demonstrate that he's a man and not a farcical pawn - he's about the only person left who can stop the US bringing about armageddon in the middle east now. My question now is : given GWB's original speech about "you're either with us or against us" - does this mean he's now going to attack France, Germany and Russia too? That's a truly scary prospect.

Today's genius headline from fark.com is "UK emergency services to be equipped with only a plastic yellow suit, a bucket, a jumbo sponge, a bottle of washing up liquid and some bleach tablets in event of chemical attack". You just don't even have to follow that link to know what they're talking about :)

There I was expecting a nice quiet day. So far so good but there was a panic this morning when Bob came to me with a face like a pit bull licking piss off a stinging nettle. Seems he made a goof in a program change. I messed up by sending it out too quick and the result was some of the UK guys have lost a days work to corrupted databases because of it. Hmm. Apart from that though, things are ok....at the moment.
We went looking at washers and driers this weekend, and for me : Big-screen TV's. Oh yes. The 51-inch Sony will be mine. Shortly, anyway.